Overhead view of a voltage-dependent potassium ion channel shows four red-tipped "paddles" that open and close in response to positive and negative charges.
This structure showed for the first time the mechanism by which potassium ions
are allowed in and out of living cells during a muscle or nerve impulse.

The Chemistry of the Cell

Roderick MacKinnon, M.D., a visiting researcher at Brookhaven National
Laboratory, won one half of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work
explaining how a class of proteins helps to generate nerve impulses -- the
electrical activity that underlies all movement, sensation, and perhaps even
thought. The work leading to the prize was done primarily at the Cornell
High Energy Synchrotron Source and the
National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven.

The proteins, called ion channels, are tiny pores that stud the surface
of all of our cells. These channels allow the passage of potassium, calcium,
sodium, and chloride molecules called ions. Rapid-fire opening and closing
of these channels releases ions, moving electrical impulses from the brain
in a wave to their destination in the body.

Starting in 1998, after 10 years studying the biophysics of ion channels,
MacKinnon published a series of structural solutions -- high-resolution
molecular-level "snapshots" of ion channels, produced at Cornell and
Brookhaven. These structures literally showed the scientific community how
electrical signaling occurs.

MacKinnon, a biophysicist and self-taught x-ray crystallographer, is a
professor at Rockefeller University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute. He shares this year's chemistry Nobel with Peter Agre,
M.D., of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates,
a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation of the State University of New York on
behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle,
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